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H-Diplo Roundtable Review
www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables
Volume XV, No. 19 (2014)
20 January 2014
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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License. To view a
copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ or send a letter to
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California, 94041, USA.
Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse
Roundtable Web/Production Editor: George Fujii
Commissioned for H-Diplo by Thomas Maddux
Introduction by David Hunt
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Edwin A. Martini. Agent Orange: History, Science and the Politics of
Uncertainty. Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press,
2012. ISBN: 978-1-55849-974-4 (cloth, $80.00); 978-1-55849-975-1
(paperback, $24.95).
Stable URL:
http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XV-19.pdf
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Contents [Page numbers refer to the PDF edition]
Introduction by David Hunt, University of Massachusetts/Boston 2
Review by David Biggs, University of California Riverside 5
Review by Diane Niblack Fox, College of the Holly Cross 9
Review by Keith Mako Woodhouse, University of Southern California 14
Author's Response by Ed Martini, Western Michigan University 17
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Introduction by David Hunt, University of Massachusetts/Boston
Showing an impressive range and creativity, Edwin Martini has followed
his earlier work on the U.S. effort to isolate and punish Vietnam after
1975 with a very different kind of book.1 It begins with an account of
Agent Orange as an instrument of war, then broadens out to examine the
consequences of the use of herbicides in Vietnam and elsewhere. Further
along, the author presents a finely-balanced treatment of scientific
implications. His approach in this regard is informed by compassion for
the many Vietnamese and Americans and others who were exposed during and
after the war, as well as reflection on the often intractable
difficulties standing in the way of determining with certainty the
connection between the health problems of individuals and the
possibility that they might have been harmed by contaminants. The book
follows upon other recent and provocative studies, and, in the opinion
of our commentators, amounts to an important contribution to the
literature.2
David Biggs discerns two tracks in the book, one providing "a detailed,
global history of Agent Orange," the second exploring the "politics of
uncertainty" driven by "the inability of scientific researchers to
definitively link exposure to Agent Orange with a variety of illnesses
claimed by plaintiffs." Biggs notes that in chapters one to three
Martini builds on earlier works, and "fleshes out these reports by
integrating archival materials and interviews with Americans and
Vietnamese." He finds a "key insight" in chapter four, which shows how
"politics and public opinion with regard to American veterans ultimately
shifted in favor of veterans, with the burden of proof shifted to the
U.S. government." Chapter five "argues for an emerging global discourse
on Agent Orange and the responsibility of governments to compensate
those exposed." Among points made in the conclusion, Biggs mentions
Martini's emphasis on the "historical asymmetries of power between the
United States and Vietnam" and the lack of attention in the U.S. to the
problems of some Vietnamese that are "allegedly caused by exposure to
Agent Orange."3
In terms of reservations, Biggs notes that Martini's sources "are almost
wholly American," while also recognizing that he "made the rounds,
visiting well-known Vietnamese figures involved in Agent Orange issues."
He declares, contrary to Martini's argument, that the U.S. military did
not procure Agent Orange and then divert it to domestic uses. But in
conclusion, he judges Agent Orange to be "a welcome addition to a
relatively new area of scholarship that merges approaches from
environmental, legal, and diplomatic history."
Diane Fox appreciates the way Martini frames his inquiry with references
to in-country Vietnam vets who, after prolonged struggle, are now
eligible for service-related disability claims, in contrast to the many
Vietnamese who were sprayed with herbicides but remain "ineligible for
U.S. support." She states that the book "describes the material
conditions for the use of herbicides in war as having been created by
the booming post-war global development, production, testing, and
distribution of petro-chemicals, coupled with the multiplying
connections between industry, corporations, and the military." Acting on
"faith in technological solutions to social and political issues,"
Americans destroyed food crops, set forest fires, and seeded clouds in
the hopes of bringing on torrential rains. Further along, she notes that
the text underscores the difficulty of drawing lines between enemy
combatants and the civilian population and says that Martini deserves
praise for adding "nuance and complexity to this oft-cited divide" and
also for following out "the global legacies of the chemical war" in
Korea, New Zealand, Italy, and Canada, as well as in the United States
Fox believes that Agent Orange is "a starting point, not an end," when
it comes to studies of the "politics of uncertainty," and poses a number
of interesting questions which future researchers might profitably
address. Perhaps she also thinks Martini could have probed more deeply
into the question of how much the military knew about the dangers for
human beings when it authorized the use of herbicides to destroy plant
life and food sources. Her overall assessment is that the book stands
"on its own as a very welcome addition to the small but growing
collection of recent works on Agent Orange."
Keith Woodhouse appreciates the many perspectives in the book, which
moves from the use of Agent Orange as a weapon of war to the problematic
attempts to arrive at a precise understanding of its effects on civilian
populations. In the later chapters, he suggests, Martini "explores the
inherent uncertainty of environmental damage and ecologic effects, and
the uncomfortable place in which that uncertainty sits in the precise
worlds of policymaking and legal decisions." He describes the author's
argument as such: the author's argument as "The United States sought to
control the Vietnamese landscape just as it sought to control the
Vietnamese people." Woodhouse seconds Martini's view that "military
planners subscribed to an atomistic view of herbicides, guerrillas,
civilians, and the landscape, compartmentalizing the various aspects of
defoliant operations in a manner that did not align with defoliant
practice."
Woodhouse faults Martini for telling "a top-down story about
environmental awareness, focusing on politicians and their programs" and
not sufficiently underscoring the role of "environmental thinking and
activism." But in general he salutes the work as "a compelling blend of
political, social, military, and environmental history."
To sum up, all the commentators affirm that more work needs to be done
on the uses and especially the effects of defoliation, and all regard
Edwin Martini's book as an important step forward in developing what
Diane Fox characterizes as "a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the
issues entailed in Agent Orange."
Participants:
Edwin Martini is Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean of
the College of Arts and Sciences at Western Michigan University. He is
the author of Invisible Enemies: The American War on Vietnam, 1975-2000
(2007) and the co-editor, with Scott Laderman, of Four Decades On:
Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War
(2013). He is currently working on a global history of napalm.
David Hunt earned a Ph.D. at Harvard and is Professor of history at
UMass/Boston. He is the author of Vietnam's Southern Revolution: From
Peasant Insurrection to Total War (Amherst, MA: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2008) and "Dirty Wars: Counterinsurgency in Vietnam
and Today," Politics and Society (2010). He is currently working on a
social history of Vietnam in the era of the Vietnam War.
David Biggs is an Associate Professor of History at the University of
California at Riverside. His recent book, Quagmire: Nation Building and
Nature in the Mekong Delta, was awarded the 2012 Marsh Prize in
Environmental History. His research explores environmental and
technological issues in Asia, especially in Vietnam. He is currently
writing a long history of war and environmental changes on the central
coast of Vietnam with a particular focus on military bases.
Diane Niblack Fox holds a PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from the
University of Washington. Her dissertation, "One Significant Ghost"--
Agent Orange: Narratives of Trauma, Survival, and Responsibility,
centered on stories told her by Vietnamese families the Red Cross
designated as "thought to be affected by Agent Orange." Chapters based
on that work have appeared in collections published by Routledge,
Cornell and Duke University Presses, and by Les Indes Savantes in Paris.
She currently teaches anthropology, Vietnamese studies, and peace
studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, where she
continues to work on the stories.
Keith Mako Woodhouse received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin
in 2010. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the University of
Southern California and Huntington Library Institute on California and
the West, and is working on a history of radical environmentalism in the
late-twentieth-century United States.
Notes
1 Edwin Martini, Invisible Enemies: The American War on Vietnam,
1975-2000 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007).
2 David Zierler, The Invention of Ecocide; Agent Orange, Vietnam, and
the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think about the Environment
(Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2011); and also the
titles mentioned by workshop participant Diane Fox. A still broader
context for consideration of ecological issues in Vietnam is developed
in David Biggs's breakthrough text Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature
in the Mekong Delta (University of Washington Press: Seattle, 2010);
and, with a focus on climate change, Eren Zink, Hot Science, High Water;
Assembling Nature, Society and Environmental Policy in Contemporary
Vietnam (Copenhagen, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, 2013).
3 This "asymmetry" is also a major theme in Martini's Imagined Enemies.
------------
Review by David Biggs, University of California Riverside
In this book, Edwin Martini sets out to do two things: write a detailed,
global history of Agent Orange and explore the "politics of uncertainty"
that fall in the center of more than three decades of trials and
hearings. The first three chapters provide a concise overview, and a
global history, of the development, use, and disposal of Agent Orange.
Martini weaves together anecdotes culled from military records and
well-known accounts from secondary histories into a story that ties in
sites including Vietnam, the United States, New Zealand, Canada and
Korea. These sites share an association with Agent Orange and the
herbicide's controversial contaminant, TCDD dioxin. The fourth chapter
explores what Martini calls a "politics of uncertainty." This refers to
the repeated court battles and legislative debates over the inability of
scientific researchers to definitively link exposure to Agent Orange
with a variety of illnesses claimed by plaintiffs. The fifth and final
chapter returns to the global history perspective, considering sites of
dioxin contamination and present-day recovery efforts around the world.
Aside from some issues with the use of figures to support broad claims
and concluding thoughts in the book, I find Agent Orange to be an
engaging synthesis of diplomatic, environmental, and legal history.
The first three chapters in many respects reprise the main features of
earlier histories of Agent Orange by such authors as William Buckingham,
Paul Cecil, and Peter Schuck.1 However, Martini fleshes out these
reports by integrating archival images, a Vietnamese propaganda comic,
other grey literature, and interviews. He includes detailed biographical
studies of key players in debates over Agent Orange such as a former
United States Air Force Colonel, Dr. Alvin Young. Young worked as a
scientist with the Air Force studying the effects of tactical herbicides
including Agent Orange. Other figures include American ambassadors to
Vietnam and senior military officials.
The book's long fourth chapter, "The Politics of Uncertainty," departs
from the global history approach to examine several major court cases
and Congressional hearings. The issue of Agent Orange contamination,
Martini argues, is historically unique in that it occurred precisely at
the time that political environmentalism resulted in the formation of
the Environmental Protection Agency and an expansion in toxic tort cases
after 1970. Agent Orange missions were curtailed just days before the
first Earth Day event in 1970. The chapter follows the class action
suits brought into federal courts by veterans alleging health impacts
connected with exposure to the chemical. The chapter's key insight is
that politics and public opinion with regard to American veterans
ultimately shifted in favor of veterans, with the burden of proof
shifted to the U.S. government. With the 1991 Agent Orange Act, Congress
gave the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) the authority to fund the
treatment of veterans for certain ailments with a presumed association
to Agent Orange. Where the U.S. government could not prove definitively
that there was absolutely no possible connection between a former
soldier's exposure to herbicides and a listed illness, it supported
treatment.
The fifth and final chapter returns to the global history, considering
cleanups at dioxin-contaminated hotspots and several more recent suits
filed by groups outside the United States. Here Martini argues for an
emerging global discourse on Agent Orange and the responsibility of
governments to compensate those exposed. He compares cleanup operations
at sites such as a former chemical plant in New Plymouth, New Zealand, a
former air base in Bien Hoa, Vietnam, and a Canadian Forces Base in
Gagetown, New Brunswick. The chapter concludes with a comparison of the
U.S. government's attitude to supporting American veterans and its
relative reluctance to extend the same support to claims brought by
people overseas, especially in Vietnam.
The conclusion is organized with questions listed as bolded subheadings,
and Martini posits three concluding statements. First, he claims that
chemical manufacturers knew about problems of dioxin contamination from
the early 1960s, but that U.S. government officials did not. Second, he
claims that the question of whether the U.S. government's use of
tactical herbicides breached bans on chemical warfare is something of a
gray area. I find this second concluding point to be somewhat out of
place since none of the preceding chapters devote extensive treatment to
U.S. approaches to international law. David Zierler's 2011 book, The
Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists Who
Changed the Way We Think about the Environment, tackles it head-on,
drawing extensively from the Presidential records of the Kennedy,
Johnson, Nixon and Ford Administrations.2 The third concluding point
ends the book with an ethical imperative: "Raising the question of
accuracy and evidence does not absolve the U.S. government and the
chemical manufacturers of their moral, ethical, and historical
responsibilities" (246). Drawing upon multiple failed attempts of
Vietnamese plaintiffs to get monetary or material support via U.S.
courts, Martini argues that historical asymmetries of power between the
United States and Vietnam mean that Americans and Vietnamese suffering
from similar health problems allegedly caused by exposure to Agent
Orange do not receive equal consideration. This is a deliberately
provocative point, and it identifies what is still a high-level
bilateral concern between Vietnam and the United States.
Martini's attempt to condense a global history of Agent Orange and
associated debates into an accessible, 247-page book is admirable.
However, as is often the case with such histories, there are inevitable
oversights. The sources used are almost wholly American, raising some
question about Vietnamese official and individual perspectives. Martini
has made the rounds, visiting well-known Vietnamese figures involved in
Agent Orange issues, and the text reflects a considerable effort to
integrate their views. My greater concern, however, is with Martini's
treatment of the technical and ecological dimensions of Agent Orange.
Imprecise use of statistics in several places and one erroneous claim
(that Round-Up contains 2,4-D, page 157) give me pause. The following
passage is one such example, suggesting that Agent Orange in 1964-65
might have ended up in domestic, non-military hands. Martini writes
(31):
I had assumed the typical barrel of Agent Orange in 1967 did, in fact,
ship to Vietnam, arriving at places like Bien Hoa and Da Nang; had it
shipped years earlier, it might not have. Buckingham has noted that in
the early phases of Ranch Hand, up to 1964, the military consumed a very
small portion of the total volume of herbicide production. Even in 1965,
of the 3.4 million gallons produced in the United States, 2.8 million
were used for domestic agricultural purposes, while only 400,000 gallons
were purchased by the USAF. Prior to the use of Agent Orange in 1965, a
variety of herbicides, some of which contained a similar combination of
2,4-D and 2,4,5-T and many of which contained significant levels of
dioxin, were produced, distributed, and tested at sites around the
world.
This passage confuses the procurement of the tactical herbicide called
Agent Orange with domestic consumption of the two component herbicides
2,4-D and 2,4,5-T. The US Army and the US Air Force placed strict
controls on testing, procurement, use, and disposal of tactical
herbicide formulations such as Agent Orange; and both agencies
prohibited diversion of this special military herbicide to non-tactical,
commercial, or domestic users. The source cited in the passage above
(William Buckingham's Operation Ranch Hand) is comparing the military's
consumption of the component herbicide chemicals 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D
relative to total domestic consumption of the same chemicals albeit in
different, commercial formulations to be used on farms, clearing rights
of way, in forestry, on ranches and in home gardens. The source cited
above is not suggesting that the military procured Agent Orange and then
diverted it to domestic use before or after 1967.
Given the scale of lawsuits associated with dioxin exposure from Agent
Orange, such details are important. One reason for a "politics of
uncertainty" in the case of Agent Orange is that the U.S. military's
research, development and use of tactical herbicides in the 1950s and
1960s occurred simultaneously with a rapidly expanding domestic demand
for herbicides, insecticides, PCBs, and solvents. This was a global
phenomenon that included industrialized countries as well as those
targeted for development aid. Herbicides, pesticides and other
chemicals were a crucial part of the Green Revolution, too. Many of
these once-available chemicals including the herbicide 2,4,5-T have
since 1970 been restricted or banned. Thus the politics of uncertainty
in Agent Orange cases stems in part from a much broader ecology of
uncertainty associated with the production and release of many different
chemicals during this boom period and in various urban and rural
environments. This larger ecological context in which Agent Orange was
situated is largely absent in the book.
In sum, Martini's book introduces a new generation of students to the
history and politics of Agent Orange; and I hope it will spur others to
leap further to consider the broader, global ecological dilemma of toxic
chemicals. Agent Orange does an admirable job of updating and
consolidating the history of this tactical herbicide's use as well as
explaining the gradual shifts in the many court cases and hearings that
have focused on toxic torts. Martini identifies some of the key
paradoxes in American domestic and foreign policy with respect to
compensating people who claim damages associated with exposure to
tactical herbicides. The fifth chapter details challenges still facing
claimants, especially those living outside the United States. In sum,
Agent Orange is a welcome addition to a relatively new area of
scholarship that merges approaches from environmental, legal, and
diplomatic history.
Notes
1 William Buckingham, Operation Ranch Hand: The Air Force and Herbicides
in Southeast Asia (Washington: Office of the Air Force History, 1982);
Paul Cecil, Herbicidal Warfare: The RANCH HAND Project in Vietnam (New
York: Praeger, 1986); Peter Schuck, Agent Orange on Trial: Mass Toxic
Disasters in the Courts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).
2 David Zierler, The Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and
the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think about the Environment.
(Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2011).
------------
Review by Diane Niblack Fox, College of the Holly Cross
"The story of Agent Orange is almost always about much more than Agent
Orange," Edwin Martini writes in the introduction to his book (12).
Treating the chemical as both a material artifact with "very real and
very serious effects" (5) and as a cultural phenomenon, Martini gives us
five such stories in this volume, five chapters bound together by themes
of Agent Orange's global connections, of its reciprocal relationship
with the rise of environmental thinking, and of its relationship-again
reciprocal-with challenges to scientific and state authority. Each
chapter is distinct and meaty enough to stand on its own as a very
welcome addition to the small but growing collection of recent works on
Agent Orange.1
In the opening pages of his book, Martini uses two vignettes to frame
the complexity of the controversies that have surrounded, and to some
extent continue to surround, Agent Orange. One is of an American veteran
with type 2 diabetes, the other of disabled Vietnamese children. The
American is eligible for a service-related disability claim because he
set foot in Saigon, though only in transit and for less than half a day;
the Vietnamese children live in an orphanage for Agent Orange Victims,
ineligible for U.S. support. Who can say for certain whether the
diabetes and the disabilities were indeed caused by exposure to the
dioxin in Agent Orange? The Veterans Administration talks of a
"suggestive" link between the disease and exposure; the director of the
orphanage, asked about the link between dioxin and the disabilities,
replies "We will never know for sure" (2). In this volume, Martini
explores the ways uncertainty has permeated debates and actions related
to the use and consequences of the chemicals America deployed in Viet
Nam.2
Three chapters strike me as most directly relevant for readers on this
listserv. The first asks how the United States got into this at best
murky territory of using chemicals in war in the first place. The second
reconstructs how the various parties involved, from policy makers to
military leaders to villagers, lived and spoke about the chemicals at
the time of their deployment. The third explores the role uncertainty
has played in shaping the ways Agent Orange has been treated in the
intersecting fields of science, politics, law, and lived experience.
Martini phrases the first question pointedly but not rhetorically: How
and why did the United States come to carry out chemical attacks on
villages in Viet Nam, destroying the crops of people they were trying to
protect and for whose hearts and minds U.S. troops were fighting (18)?
His answer draws on archival work in military and government records
that shed light on the decision-making process, which he sets against
the backdrop of the political, military, and material conditions of the
period, the late 1950's and early 1960's. He sketches the time as one of
intense political and military battles in Southeast Asia, fired by
decolonization and the Cold War, and a time of a post-Second World-War
glow of victory in America, with a technocratic mindset prevailing in
Washington, paired with a sense of mission rooted in idealism, a belief
in U.S. superiority, and a refusal to accept the limits of power. He
describes the material conditions for the use of herbicides in war as
having been created by the booming post-war global development,
production, testing, and distribution of petro-chemicals, coupled with
the multiplying connections between industry, corporations, and the
military. The preparations for the wartime use of chemicals grew these
connections, Martini tells us, giving rise to test sites, factories, and
storage centers that stretched across the nation and around the world:
Arkansas, California, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, Mississippi, New York,
Oregon, Texas, Puerto Rico, Canada, South Viet Nam, Thailand-- the list
continues, with 40 sites in all (32).
The use of chemicals in war moved from possibility to plan of action
when the newly-elected John F. Kennedy sent a high level delegation to
Viet Nam to investigate the deteriorating position of President Ngo Dinh
Diem, the U.S. ally in Saigon. Included in the delegation was James
Brown of the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) at Fort Detrick, who made
the case for herbicides as a tool for counterinsurgency. (Of the 12,000
chemical compounds studied by the CWS, more than 60 came to be used in
Viet Nam, of which the six herbicides continue to draw the most
attention (22).) According to Martini, Kennedy thought of chemicals as
an alternative to nuclear weapons (21), and intended the herbicide use
to be limited, a technological alternative, not a supplement, to the
deployment of combat troops (see page 26, where Martini cites David
Zierler's argument).
Martini calls this faith in technological solutions to social and
political issues an illusive, and elusive, "dream of control by the
White House and the Pentagon, including control over nature itself"
(41). Herbicidal warfare was but one example of this illusion. Huge
forest fires were set or intensified, and clouds were seeded in the
hopes of producing flooding and landslides. The monsoon rains largely
frustrated the plans for control by fire, although considerable
environmental destruction resulted nevertheless. That military
intelligence was able to counter concerns about potential danger to
human life from the flooding and landslides with the argument that
people there were "used to dealing with floods" (49) once again gives
rise to the question: how were these actions imagined to be able to win
over the people affected by them? One is left hoping that our
understanding of our shared humanity has grown over the last half
century on a par with the growth in our understanding of the toxicity of
the dioxin in Agent Orange.
In his second chapter, Martini further explores the complexities of U.S.
engagement through the records of those present at the time, noting the
gap between words and deeds, between the ideal and the real, as well as
the unresolved clash between military and political objectives. For the
most part-but with an important exception, noted below-the military
intended the herbicides to defoliate enemy soldier cover and destroy
enemy crops. But the on-the-ground result was the destruction of
civilian crops as well; indeed, of course, at times the two were
indistinguishable. Civilian crops themselves were targeted during the
strategic hamlet program, however, as part of an attempt to separate
'the fish from the sea,' the revolutionaries from the people, by forcing
villagers out of their homes and into fortified 'strategic hamlets'-a
move the military thought of as protection, and many villagers, as a
form of eviction and imprisonment. The military, to the end, saw the use
of herbicides as successful, and argued to continue the program; policy
makers looking at political results argued for its end. It is a strength
of Martini's work that he is able to add nuance and complexity to this
oft-cited divide. (See, for example, his treatment of the RAND studies,
62-69 and 81-92.)
In The chapter entitled "The Politics of Uncertainty: Science, Politics,
and the State," Martini brings us back to the debates over the effects
of Agent Orange, and to the "multiple, intersecting, and competing
epistemologies" that shape them (149) as he traces the social
construction of their particular reality, to paraphrase Peter Berger.3
He looks at the ways media stories, senate hearings, legal proceedings,
contested scientific studies, accounts of personal experience, and the
contrasting ways the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand treated their
veterans and their claims have all intersected in the stories told about
the effects of the chemicals, as all parties "[seek] answers to a number
of questions that could not, and likely never will be, answered" (150).
The strength of the chapter is its use of archival work and interviews
to render more complex some of the key events that are frequently
included in narratives told about Agent Orange, by highlighting the role
that uncertainty played in each.
I think of this chapter as a starting point, not an end, however-a seed
for future research that could be grown into its own book. In that
regard I am a bit puzzled by David Zierler's claim on the back cover
that after this volume it is hard to imagine why anyone would attempt to
add to the body of literature on Agent Orange. While Martini has given
us a more complete picture of some of the issues in some of the debates,
his heavy reliance in this chapter on one voice, that of government
scientist Alvin Young, strikes me as an invitation to further work. As
the fierce debates of the 1980's become footnotes in the history books,
it is good to document that voice; it would be even better to document
equally the voices of people who disagree with Young, of whom there are
many. And it would be good to bring the study forward into the
twenty-first century, through the lens of a student of the history of
science, or history of medicine. What uncertainties have become more
certain in the past twenty years? What questions remain? But these are
not so much critiques of the work that Martini has given us, as hopes
for future work that will build on his, perhaps from the desk of a
historian of science or medicine.
Another topic that Martini opens to further research even as he seeks to
close it, it seems to me, is the debate over a letter sent in 1988 by
Dr. James R. Clary of the Chemical Weapons Service to Democratic Senator
Tom Daschle, affirming that the military had known of the toxic effects
of the chemicals at the time, but was not too concerned because they
were to be used on the enemy. Martini cites this letter as the only
shred of evidence that the military did know and disregarded the
potential for harm to humans, suggesting that it may be better to think
of the letter as a revision of knowledge shaped by time and the trauma
of the war, rather than as proof of a U.S. government cover-up, which is
how the letter has at times been used. It seems to me such speculation
could cut both ways: that it is just as reasonable to suppose that the
CWS took pains to learn about the chemicals it worked with, and did have
knowledge of its potential effects. Whether or not one then wishes to
make claims about conspiracies and cover-ups seems to me a separate
matter, to be argued on separate grounds. Again, careful research seems
to me the way to handle this question; and, again, this is not a
critique of Martini's work, but an invitation to further work. I
appreciate his effort to defuse the inflamed and inflammatory rhetoric
that sometimes accompanies the issue.
I do have one strong critique, however. It is on the level of mechanics,
not content. As a researcher interested in the many stories and legacies
of Agent Orange, I am baffled-frustrated and thwarted-by the absence of
a bibliography, both to draw on as a resource for my own work, and as a
way to get an overall sense of the basis for this present volume. I hope
one will appear in a second edition. And I hope someone writing on Agent
Orange will one day produce a chronology that will help us see more
clearly the simultaneous development of the story of Agent Orange across
many fields of discourse.
Before concluding this review, let me note that the book's two other
chapters are also well worth reading for anyone interested in developing
a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the issues entailed in Agent
Orange. Martini's third chapter recounts the ending and post-war
destruction of the chemicals, drawing useful comparisons with approaches
to handling dioxin contamination in Times Beach, Missouri, Seveso,
Italy, Alsea, Oregon, and New Plymouth, New Zealand. His final chapter
treats the global legacies of the chemical war. He offers comparative
insights into the approaches to and premises of the legal battles over
chemical exposure in Korea, New Zealand, and Canada; fresh insight and
nuance to the Vietnamese attempt to sue the chemical corporations; and
discussion of the work on the 'hot spots' that remain contaminated and
contaminating in Vietnam today, sometimes hundreds of times above the
World Health Organization's (WHO) standard for acceptable dioxin levels,
in places where Agent Orange was stored or spilled or repeatedly sprayed
intensively, as around the perimeter of military bases.
At the conclusion of his work - which he characterizes as "far from
comprehensive"(8)-Martini offers three questions to which his work can
suggest what he calls "preliminary answers": "How could the United
States and its allies do such a thing?"; "Should the use of Agent Orange
be considered chemical warfare?"; and "What can and should be done for
U.S. veterans, Vietnamese victims, and others around the world who
believe they are suffering as a result of Agent Orange?" (239, 242, 244)
Whether or not you agree with his answers, these questions, and
Martini's s discussion of them, are well worth pondering.
Notes
1 See, for example: David Zierler, The Invention of Ecocide: Agent
Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think about
the Environment (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011); Charles
Waugh and Huy Lien, eds, Family of Fallen Leaves: Stories of Agent
Orange by Vietnamese Writers (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
2010); and Fred Wilcox, Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in
Vietnam (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011). Several other works are
currently in various stages of preparation. Of particular interest is a
forthcoming work by Tine Gammeltoft (working title: Haunting Images: A
Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam, Berkeley:
University of California Press), and a dissertation by Takeshi Uesugi,
Delayed Reactions: 'Conjuring Agent Orange in Twenty-First Century
Vietnam, for the Department of Anthropology, McGill University,
Montreal.
2 Determination of cause of disease at the individual level is not as
clear as the effects of dioxin exposure seen in the laboratory, or as
statistical probability for a population. Analogies have been made to
trying to know 'for sure,' for any given individual, the cause of lung
cancer, or even the common cold. Not everyone who smokes gets lung
cancer, and not everyone with lung cancer has smoked. If we are in a
group of people exposed to cold germs, I may start sneezing, and you may
not.
3 Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality: A
Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books,
1966).
------------
Review by Keith Mako Woodhouse, University of Southern California
Edwin Martini's Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of
Uncertainty approaches the story of Agent Orange from several different
angles at once. Martini is primarily interested in the United States
military's use of, and later destruction of, the industrial herbicide.
But he is also deeply concerned with the politics surrounding Agent
Orange's proven and alleged effects on living beings, the role of
scientific authority in those political debates, and the influence of
ecological ideas on the ethics of deploying weaponized herbicides. The
history of Agent Orange, Martini convincingly argues, must include all
of these perspectives.
The broad effort to defoliate jungles and destroy crops was known as
'Operation Ranch Hand.' From the first chapter of Agent Orange, Martini
explains Ranch Hand in terms of ecological thought (or, more often, its
absence). The defoliation program assumed the same domineering stance
toward the natural world that environmentalists would soon challenge.
The United States sought to control the Vietnamese landscape just as it
sought to control the Vietnamese people, Martini says, and its various
leaders believed that American military might and technological
sophistication would facilitate both goals. The technocrats of the
Kennedy Administration thought the United States "could, through the
analysis and manipulation of data and the proper application of modern
tools, including herbicides, impose its will on that environment and its
inhabitants" (19). In successive operations initiated under President
John Kennedy and continued under Lyndon Johnson, the United States used
bombs, napalm, fire, and herbicides (Agent Blue and Agent White in
addition to Agent Orange) to render massive swaths of jungle less
friendly to guerrillas and more manageable to American forces. This
largely unsuccessful effort was less an instance of a war on the natural
world than it was an attempt to pacify an unruly environment. "In other
words," Martini writes of the war planners, "they treated the forest
less like the [Viet Cong] than like the southern Vietnamese population
the United States was ostensibly trying to protect" (46). And, like
American programs for managing the southern Vietnamese, the
jungle-taming operations overestimated American influence and
underestimated the complexity of the task at hand. "The control of
nature" Rachel Carson wrote in the early 1960s, "is a phrase conceived
in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy,
when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man."1
Martini argues that a similar illusion of control, bred of a similar
arrogance, characterized American efforts to manipulate the political,
social, and natural environments of Vietnam for more than a decade.
Efforts to control natural and human environments in the twentieth
century were often grounded in an ignorance of just how complicated
those environments could be. Rachel Carson tried to confront that
ignorance when she published Silent Spring in 1962. The premise of
Carson's most famous work is that everything is interconnected, and that
chemicals cannot be introduced into ecosystems in an isolated manner.
This was another lesson lost on military planners in the early stages of
the Vietnam War. Dumping clouds of herbicide on large regions of the
countryside might go some distance toward accomplishing the tactical
goals of clearing jungle and destroying enemy food supplies. But
inevitably Agent Orange would also destroy civilian crops, and frighten
civilians themselves by bathing them in an unfamiliar substance with
little warning. Vietnamese villagers recognized both that the Viet Cong
presence led to the use of Agent Orange and that it was the Americans
who were deploying the crop-killing clouds. Because villagers could
reasonably blame either side, or both, the United States engaged in
large-scale propaganda efforts to convince civilians that American
forces were fighting for them. According to Martini, what the architects
of the war failed to understand was that individual human beings could
not be separated from their environment, whether for the purpose of
dumping herbicides on plants but not on people or for trying to convince
those people that harm to their fields and farms was not, in fact, harm
to them also. Agent Orange did not discriminate between enemy and
noncombatant, or between Viet Cong crops and civilian crops, and could
not be dumped on the enemy without being dumped on other people and on
the landscape as well. Before Silent Spring and a nascent
environmentalism popularized the ecological view that all life is
interconnected, Martini argues, military planners subscribed to an
atomistic view of herbicides, guerrillas, civilians, and the landscape,
compartmentalizing the various aspects of defoliant operations in a
manner that did not align with defoliant practice. Distinctions between
targets and outcomes that were clear in Washington, D.C. conference
rooms were harder to discern through a haze of Agent Orange in Vietnam's
villages and jungles.
Agent Orange is a compelling blend of political, social, military, and
environmental history, and it works hard to put environmental thought,
military planning, and political conflict alongside each other. The
intersections of these various narrative threads are often fascinating.
Environmental thought tends to get the least textured treatment, though,
and is often a sort of abstraction that hovers above the on-the-ground
action. Martini claims that the history of the Agent Orange controversy
pivoted on "environmentalist thinking" that led to sharp restrictions on
the herbicide's use and handling. But the specific contours and
advocates of environmentalist thinking are not always clear. Who was
behind this thinking, and what sort of influence did they have? When did
it really take hold in discussions of Agent Orange? Martini establishes
that by the time of Operation Pacer HO - the incineration of Agent
Orange stockpiles - in the late 1970s, an "environmental awareness" had
"taken root in American society" and was reflected in particular laws
and regulations (117). Accordingly, the military set strict standards
for the handling and disposal of Agent Orange. But "[t]he point here is
not that the military itself had an official change of heart"; rather,
"a new regulatory apparatus was in place...one that forced the military
to deal with the herbicides and the potential dangers, real or imagined,
in a wholly different manner" (126). Martini often points to regulatory
regimes as engines of environmental thought rather than as consequences
of environmental thinking and activism. "The environmental legislation
signed into law by Nixon in the early 1970s also raised awareness about
air and water pollution," Martini states, although most historians of
the period would probably describe causation the other way around (115).
Martini tends to tell a top-down story about environmental awareness,
focusing on politicians and their programs. He defends early planners
and their cavalier use of dioxin-tinged herbicides from what he
considers unfair criticism by reminding us that environmental thinking
was little-known at the time, and "that worldview was not available to
the policymakers who designed and implemented Operation Ranch Hand"
(243). But Operation Ranch Hand began right around the time Silent
Spring was making headlines and sparking a debate about the pesticide
DDT, a debate President Kennedy himself weighed in on. And according to
Christopher Sellers's most recent work, Rachel Carson was only
articulating a set of ideas - Sellers calls it a "chemically conceived
naturalism" - that suburban homeowners had been discussing already.2
President Nixon, meanwhile, seems to have been surprisingly ahead of the
curve, passing strict rules about dealing with Agent Orange at a time
when "the science and politics of herbicides and dioxins were still very
new to the American public and their elected representatives" (115).
These presidents and presidential administrations were likely responding
to cold political calculations as much as to environmental thinking,
making the story of Agent Orange and environmentalism a matter not just
of emerging environmental awareness but of which environmentalists were
or were not paying attention to weaponized herbicides and how much
influence those environmentalists held. Environmental awareness ebbs and
flows and specific moments shift the discussion, as Martini himself
demonstrates at one point through his rich discussion of Times Beach,
Missouri, where oil containing dioxin was used to spray local roads,
leading eventually to the abandonment of the entire town and greater
national concern about dioxin. That story is a rare moment of
contingency in the book's treatment of environmental thinking.
Martini suggests that his research and writing on this topic are only
beginning, which is good news for historians of the period and of
environmentalism more generally. There are many provocative ideas in
Agent Orange that deserve further discussion. Martini's first chapter
title, "Only You Can Prevent Forests," was the ironic slogan of
Operation Ranch Hand and a play on the United States Forest Service's
own slogan, "Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires." Much more ironic,
though, and thought-provoking, is the consulting work that the Forest
Service did as part of Operation Ranch Hand. At the exact moment the
conservation movement was trying to protect fragile American forests,
the Forest Service was trying (and largely failing) to destroy durable
Vietnamese jungles. Even more provocative - and central to Agent Orange
- is what Martini calls "the politics of uncertainty." The second half
of the book explores the inherent uncertainty of environmental damage
and ecological effects, and the uncomfortable place in which that
uncertainty sits in the precise worlds of policymaking and legal
decisions. "The politics of uncertainty" have obvious relevance to all
sorts of environmental issues, but especially to the dilemma of climate
change. Historicizing the way that complex environmental phenomena are
translated into the political sphere (or not) is a crucial project.
Agent Orange is a valuable and revealing part of that larger effort, and
Martini's future work will doubtless build on its strong initial
discussion.
Notes
1 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994
(1962)), p. 297.
2 Christopher Sellers, Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise
of Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2012), p. 9.
------------
Author's Response by Ed Martini, Western Michigan University
I want to begin by thanking the H-Diplo staff and editorial team, Tom
Maddux, and especially my colleagues David Biggs, Diane Fox, and Keith
Woodhouse for expending their valuable time and energy to read, review,
and offer their critiques of my work. I'm quite pleased that they found
the book, on the whole, to be a positive contribution to the literature
on Agent Orange and that they agree with me that the book should be seen
as another step in our understanding of a complicated and controversial
issue, rather than the final word on the subject.
Since I started researching this book nearly a decade ago, the most
exciting and the most challenging aspects of Agent Orange have
consistently revolved around its complexity and interdisciplinarity. I
began the book out of sheer curiosity, attempting to understand a topic
that consistently seemed to be oversimplified by what appeared to be two
'sides' of an ongoing battle. On the one hand, military histories of
Operation Ranch Hand often seem to take at face value the documentation
proffered through official channels, while other approaches to the topic
appeared more driven by political advocacy, seeking to reclaim the
voices of the victims of Agent Orange, but often at the expense of
historical context. To deal with this problem, I sought to employ an
interdisciplinary approach that forced me to struggle, and often
stumble, across unfamiliar terrain. In addition to working in numerous
archival collections around the world, I attempted to learn from
scholars working in such fields as toxicology, epidemiology, and public
health history. Their work, particularly on the concept of uncertainty,
was invaluable in helping me make sense of at least some of the
mysteries that continue to surround Agent Orange. The reviews assembled
here seem to validate my overall approach and also suggest some areas in
which the project was perhaps more successful than others.
For those who are unfamiliar with the work of Diane Fox, it is worth
noting that she is a pioneer in Agent Orange research. Her dissertation
and subsequent publications have played a critical role in
reconstructing the voices of many in Vietnam, particularly Vietnamese
women, who were affected by Agent Orange and whose stories are, for the
most part, not collected elsewhere. Her work has been instrumental in
shaping future approaches to the topic, including my own.1
Fox raises two particular issues to which I would like to respond. The
first concerns my chapter on "The Politics of Uncertainty," which
explores the battles fought in several nations from the late 1970s to
the early 1990s over where the burden of proof in Agent Orange exposure
and benefits determinations should lay. While I agree with Fox that this
chapter is not the last word on the subject, I was surprised that her
primary reason for this suggestion is my "heavy reliance" on the voice
of Alvin Young, a retired Air Force colonel who was an active
participant in a number of events recounted in the book, and a
controversial one at that, often being seen an apologist for Agent
Orange. It is true that I make extensive use of Young's work and records
in this chapter; regardless of what his critics make of his
interpretations of Agent Orange over the years, his voice was incredibly
important in shaping the debate during the 1980s and beyond, and it had
been previously left out of previous accounts. It is simply not
accurate, however, to suggest that I fail to "document equally" the
voices of people who disagree with Young. In the specific chapter to
which Fox refers, the voice of Young is constantly juxtaposed with those
on opposing sides, including workers at the Veterans Administration,
members of Congress, and scientists such as Jeanne and Steven Stellman,
not to mention the many veterans who worked during these years to
reverse the burden of proof in Agent Orange claims.
Fox makes a similar point about the infamous 'Clary Letter,' written by
James Clary to Democratic Senator Tom Daschle in 1988, which to this day
remains the only piece of 'evidence' (written two decades after the
fact) that the military knew early on about the dangers of Agent Orange
and continued to use it in spite of that knowledge. Fox suggests in her
critique of my reading of the letter and its role in the history of
Agent Orange that "such speculation could cut both ways," and that "it
is as just as reasonable to suppose" that the military did indeed know
what Clary's letter alleges. The point of my argument, however, is not
about whether or not such a supposition is reasonable; it is about
historical and scientific evidence, and the limits of that evidence in
answering questions about Agent Orange. Fox writes that "careful
research seems to me the way to handle this question [of the Clary
letter]." I agree completely, which is why I spent the better part of
the last ten years looking high and low for any piece of evidence that
would corroborate the letter. I found none. That doesn't mean that none
exists, but it does support my argument in the book that burden of proof
in this particular debate should continue to be borne by those who would
use the Clary letter as the sole piece of evidence in their claims of
conspiracies and cover-ups.
Finally, and on a lighter note, as to Fox's concern about the lack of a
bibliography, I can only apologize and note that this was an issue of
space and cost, rather than choice. This is an unfortunate reality for
many university presses these days. The last thing I would wish is to
leave any reader "baffled, frustrated, and thwarted," but I am confident
that readers will find the full citations for the sources in the
extensive notes at the end of the volume.
I have never considered myself an environmental historian, although my
engagement with the field over the past several years has had a major
impact on my work. Still, as both David Biggs and Keith Woodhouse point
out, this book might have benefited from greater attention to the larger
"ecological uncertainty" (Biggs) and "environmentalist thought"
(Woodhouse) that surround the history and legacies of Agent Orange.
Woodhouse argues that my engagement with the rise of environmentalist
thinking that largely coincided with the active years of Operation Ranch
Hand "is often a sort of abstraction that hovers above the on-the-ground
action." I would respectfully quarrel with the "abstraction" descriptor,
but it is true that I consider the rise of the modern environmental
movement to be one part of the larger context that is critical to
understanding the ways in which public understandings of Agent Orange
and its associated dioxin evolved in the 1970s and into the 1980s. I
never intended to write a detailed history of the rise of this shift in
thinking, but if it comes across to Woodhouse, who is far more
knowledgeable in this area than I, that I have represented "regulatory
regimes as engines of environmental thought rather than as consequences
of environmental thinking and activism," then that is unfortunate; that
was certainly not my intention. I would suggest, however, that while it
is certainly correct to say that the environmental protection measures
signed into law during the Nixon administration were a response to the
rise of environmentalist thinking in the United States, rather than the
"engine" that drove that thinking, it remains true that those laws, in
turn, also helped to raise awareness about air and water pollution.
I am somewhat less convinced by Woodhouse's related argument that I have
written a "top-down story about environmental awareness." It is true,
especially in the earlier chapters of the book, that I focus on
"politicians and their programs," and that I argue that it is largely
unfair to expect members of the Kennedy administration to have taken a
more ecological view of the herbicide program in the early 1960s. Even
if Woodhouse is correct that I let the policymakers off too easily,
other sections of the book look in detail at the ways in which a variety
of communities around the world have negotiated the meanings of Agent
Orange from the ground up. In places including Times Beach, Missouri;
New Plymouth, New Zealand; and New Brunswick, Canada; and for veterans
and civilians alike across the United States and Vietnam, let alone
Australia and New Zealand, the stories I tell in the book are largely
about the struggles of everyday citizens to navigate the expansion of
scientific knowledge about dioxin and shifting attitudes about
chemicals, bodies, and the environment. Whether in the fatalism of
residents who refused to leave Times Beach, or in the popular
epidemiology, literally built from the ground up by citizen-scientists
in New Zealand, I would argue that Agent Orange is far from a top-down
approach throughout.
David Biggs offers perhaps the strongest critiques of the book. First,
he argues that I make "imprecise use of statistics" and cites a passage
where he believes I suggest that the military may have diverted military
herbicides for domestic use. In this particular instance, and in
pointing out that I listed 2,4-D as the active ingredient in Round-Up
herbicide (rather than glysophate, the primary commercial competitor of
2,4-D), Biggs is correct. The passage he cites is largely a case of
clumsy editing on my part, rather than factual error. The point of the
larger section from which he draws describes the global apparatus that
was constructed to support the production, shipping, and testing of
herbicides including Agent Orange and, relatedly, the widespread
domestic use of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T during the same period. The way in
which those ideas are conflated in that particular paragraph, is, in
retrospect, confusing, and I appreciate Biggs's careful reading. The
point about the global reach of these chemicals remains, and the pages
that follow this passage make that clear. Nevertheless, Biggs notes
rightly that such details are important, and I should have been clearer
in each case.
Biggs's second, and larger, point echoes Woodhouse's concerns about my
treatment of the ecological and environmental dimensions of the story,
but extends this to a more global scale. He argues that the "politics of
uncertainty" I describe stem "in part from a much broader ecology of
uncertainty associated with the production and release of many different
chemicals during this boom period and in various urban and rural
environments. This larger ecological context in which Agent Orange was
situated is largely absent in the book" (Biggs's emphasis). If I
understand his point, Biggs is suggesting that I might have done more to
describe the larger impact of chemicals in general during the second
half of the twentieth century. I had hoped that I had done so throughout
the book, by discussing the ways in which chemical plants, military
bases, and the chemical-as-global-commodity impacted multiple
communities around the globe. This, again, was a main thrust of the
discussion in sections devoted to New Zealand, Canada, and Missouri, in
which herbicides and chemicals, but not Agent Orange itself, had
profound effects on local actors. Still, Biggs and Woodhouse have
written more extensively than I have about these topics, and I defer to
their expertise. I look forward to continued engagement with their work
and hope to continue to learn from it.
I close the book with the following passage:
As I said in the introduction, my goal is to provide context, not
closure. I have attempted to bring some balance to the history and
legacies of the chemical war, to seek out some likely explanations in
the middle ground long abandoned in the polarized politics of Agent
Orange. No amount of historical context will provide comfort to the
children of Da Nang and A Luoi, aging American veterans, or to the
millions around the world who feel, rightly or wrongly, that they and
their loved ones are victims of the chemical war. Their search for
answers will continue for some time. So, too, will mine.
And so it does. I truly appreciate the comments of Professors Biggs,
Fox, and Woodhouse, and thank them once again for helping me, and all
those others on the trail of Agent Orange, to continue that search.
Notes
1 For a sample of Fox's work, see Diane Niblack Fox, "One Significant
Ghost": Agent Orange, Narratives of Trauma, Survival, and
Responsibility," (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 2007);
"Chemical Politics and the Hazards of Modern Warfare: Agent Orange," in
Monica Casper, ed. Synthetic Planet: Chemical Politics and the Hazards
of Modern Life (New York: Routledge, 2003); and "Agent Orange: Coming to
Terms with a Transnational Legacy," in Scott Laderman and Edwin A.
Martini, eds., Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the
Legacies of the Second Indochina War (Durham: Duke University Press,
2013).
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